Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men

By Lori B. Girshick
University Press of New England

Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men is a useful and forward-thinking book that offers an invaluable glimpse into the lives of folks whose gender identity, gender presentation, and biological sex don’t match up in the ways society expects them to. Sociologist and activist Lori B. Girshick provides a literature review of the most cutting-edge gender theory, gives us perspective into the long history of gender variance and its natural place in human cultures and among animals of other species, and ends with advocating the adoption of a radically inclusive alternative model of gender and sexuality.

The book’s greatest strength, however, lies in its extensive quoting of the in-depth interviews with 150 sex- and gender-variant people that formed the basis of Girshick’s research. Their candid and sometimes heart-rending accounts reveal diverse experiences of self-definition and coming out, of evolving relationships and sexual orientations, and of all-too-frequent encounters with discrimination and violence. These stories, and Girshick’s insightful analysis, clearly show how normal and natural gender variance is – and how much harm is caused by cultural assumptions that it is not. Transgender Voices points a way forward toward a more inclusive and liberated world for us all.

Review by Ari Moore

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Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men